


Business Interruptions

by Greykite



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Clones, Dark Character, Gen, Horror Elements, Implied/Referenced Suicide, dark humour, probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-22 23:07:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23001856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greykite/pseuds/Greykite
Summary: Inspired by anonymous prompt: "Every time when Shepard is maimed or killed, or begins to suspect something and behave incorrectly, she is replaced by her clone! And Miranda is on the team for exactly this purpose - to keep an eye on Shepard and replace her from time to time from the "secret room"."
Kudos: 6





	Business Interruptions

...Shepard raises her rifle, but she already knows: it's too late. The projectile slams into her side, bypassing the shields that haven't had time to reload and breaking the armor — and what's underneath it explodes: red-black and foul-smelling. 

The view is covered with a bloody veil. The shouts of her companions seem to come from far away.  
She falls into a pool of her own blood. Another shot pierces the helmet: shards pierce the eyes, cut the lips. Fingers that tried to pull the trigger one last time become feeble and slip off. 

There is nothing else but angry annoyance and pain; but they soon disappear, too.

***

  
...Miranda leans over the operating table, biting her lip; abstracts herself from the situation.  
From those who wait, loitering on the living deck, pretending that nothing happened.  
Pretending that commander Shepard wasn't dead when she was brought aboard.

Miranda's brows draw together in annoyance. 

"You'd think," she says to herself, "like this is your first time. You should have gotten used to it a long time ago." 

The body under her hands, clad in sterile gloves, is new, without a trace of scars. However, this is exactly what she intends to fix. Here, on Shepard’s face — Miranda runs her hand over this smooth cheek almost tenderly — and on her side. 

"I'm sorry, commander, but your guts almost fell out in the last battle. Oh, yes, you also hit your head very hard. Concussion causes temporary amnesia. Here are the statistics."

(Shepard never reads the statistics.)

Miranda moves her stiff shoulders. All these cosmetics — and then she just needs to connect here the machine for neural connections’ firmware. Miranda had already stuffed everything she needed under the skull-bone. 

She hopes that the next body will have time to mature before this one predictably comes to an end.

***

  
Shepard turns abruptly, narrowing her eyes. In the half-light they flash scarlet.

"Wait a minute, Lawson.”

Miranda appears to be leaning her shoulder obediently against the wall of the conference room. She mentally calculates the disposition. Jacob is already outside the door. The others left even earlier. 

"I remember something," Shepard says, frowning. “This meeting... it's already been held. Before. It was about the Reaper ship, and there — " She looks both at Miranda and inside herself; it doesn't bode well. “Someone died there. Right?”

Miranda doesn't allow herself to think twice. She whips out a submachine gun and puts a puts a burst of fire in Shepard. The uniform is quickly soaked in blood, but on the dark fabric these spots, thank the Universe, are not too noticeable. 

Miranda manages to pick up the body before the fall makes additional noise. 

It is a good thing that the passage to the cryo-storage facility was made right from this room: she didn't need any more explanations right now.

***

  
Shepard pauses at the door to the captain's cabin.

“Thank you. Sort of.”

"Someone else might have found you, not me," Miranda shakes her head. "Still, please, use less stimulants, commander. We have stressful circumstances, but if the ship's captain again falls unconscious after the briefing and doesn't get up, what will happen to morale?”

"And who's going to stop the Collectors," Shepard nods. “But I have a long experience with these kind of drugs. And you said that my body was basically just improved from your project. So what’s problem in this?”

"It is improved, of course," Miranda says. “But it has become more finely tuned. That is, of course, Dr. Chakwas may order additional tests and decide based on the results…”

Shepard's mouth twists. 

“I see. My job is to shoot vile alien creatures on a strict schedule, and then go to bed, as if the Galaxy is not in danger compared to which healthy sleep is nothing. What's not to understand here?”

Miranda's grin is mirrored Shepard’s.

“I didn't say that. But if you prefer it that way, commander…”

“And to think I wanted to invite you for a drink”.

“No need, commander. I don't drink after eight, ship time.”

***

  
Before her resurrection, Shepard had a slightly less extreme haircut.

But it's even easier with that. No extra strands will have to be removed to the side so they do not to get in the way. 

She absently runs her fingers over the back of her head. Prickly hair down scratches the skin. 

This feeling had begun to haunt her since the day before last. Maybe even earlier. 

_"She's not she."_

She belongs to another place - frozen, deaf and dark as a womb. There is sticky slime that clogged the nostrils and mouth. There's something humming. Shadows move. Condensation settles on the walls. 

Or was it only her imagination? 

But she's a soldier. Exuberant imagination is a contraindication for this profession. And also a reason for a course of conversations with a psychologist. 

She swallows; feels the muscles and bones moving under the skin like pistons. 

Garrus and Mordin looked at her like that, and Garrus asked her what was wrong, where she was looking, and she couldn't say that she had forgotten what year it was. One planet overlapped with another, the landscape doubled, and it didn't help just to shake her head. 

It’s good that the mission was for gathering the intelligence. 

But... if she freaks out in a more serious situation? 

She's almost made it. Not bad for a formal dead woman. Assembled a team. Found the route to the enemy’s lair. 

They can manage without her.

Shepard straightens her back. Resolutely squeezes her fingers on the gun. Puts the muzzle under her chin.

A second later the wall of the cabin behind her back is stained with scarlet.

***

  
"...Damn it,” Miranda thinks with annoyance. She is summoned to the captain's cabin by red-seven — a special signal known only to her and EDI. "Damn this imbalance in the amniotic fluid composition."

The same imbalance that causes a new clone to wake up earlier than expected in one case out of five. And the first memory is imprinted in the brain before the any programmed pattern.

***

  
...Shepard opens her eyes — and then squints, blinking away tears that have come out from the bright light.

Her throat hurts. How long had she been out? 

A plastic, transparent glass of water is poked at her lips. 

Shepard drinks gratefully, greedily. Her head is muddy. She doesn't remember anything at all after they landed on... fuck. Where did they land? 

"Don't be nervous, commander. You were badly hurt. Mental confusion…”

Shepard waves her hand. Dr. Chakwas pauses — and for some reason relieve is written over her face.

Miranda Lawson steps out from behind her. She smiles — Shepard would like to think that's encouraging, but Shepard already has knew this bitch well.

“I'll take care of you now. Dr. Chakwas not have the necessary data about your restored body.” The doctor frowns, but says nothing. “I hope you understand that your perfect health is the key to success in the mission against Collectors?”

The perfect bitch. What else she may say. But she's right. 

Shepard nods. She understands everything like that, of course.

***

  
Shepard stares from the field stretcher; her eyes are blank, meaningless. The place where her skull was broken by some lucky collector's creature is shyly covered with a wide patch with a medigel lining. The lining is already soaked with blood and goo, but at least it doesn't let anything out.

Miranda listens to Garrus and Jacob while they interrupting each other and wonders if the device has remain untouched. 

«Chip». As fans of cheap sci-fi gum would call it. 

The iron spike entered the brain tissue too deep and too close to the medulla oblongata. There is a certain risk. 

But Miranda had lived for two years with the knowledge that she had signed up for the most hopeless adventure of the century. She kneads her fingers; she squeezes and unclenches her hand. 

"Take her to the lab," she says. 

"Dr. Chakwas?" Dr. Mordin? " Here she is — that annoying Kelly Chambers, as always. After a closer look, she covers her mouth with both her hands — no doubt her breakfast was begging to go outside of her. Cover is a cover, but Cerberus employees should still have stronger nerves. 

"Don't bother them," Miranda says. “Yet if their consultation will be needed, I'll ask EDI to contact them through the internal channel.”

Having unloaded Shepard on the table in the makeshift operating room, Garrus turns to Miranda. He crosses his arms over his chest.

"You know what? You're always volunteering to patch her yourself, Lawson. Don't you think someone might find this suspicious?”

Miranda straightens up. She blocks Shephard’s body with her own and stares back at the turian.

"Everyone does what they do best. So get on with your guns, turian. And I will deal with her body. You don't want Shepard to never come back, do you?”

Garrus looks at her like a wolf — or what animal occupies a similar ecological niche on this Palaven of theirs? — but he's still lowering his crippled snout. 

“No, I don't want to, " he admits dully.

"That's great," Miranda says. “Now please vacate the premises. We need to act quickly here.”

***

  
Miranda places a fragment of the skull bone from the back of Shepard’s head on a metal stand, along with two others that she take earlier. She tries on, superimposes a three-dimensional map of the brain on the reality of a white-gray irregular clot in front of her eyes.

Every time here as the first time; the slightest carelessness — and all will be lost. 

For the first time, they created all the connections in Shepard's brain literally by hand — based on the exhaustive analysis that the commander, at the insistence of one of Cerberus ' embedded agents, had passed on the Citadel before the fatal last mission. But Miranda decided — and the Illusive Man, after a moment's thought, agreed with her opinion — that the risk of repeating it over and over again was too great.

In the end the amount of money spent was not so sky-high — compared to what was already invested in the project. 

In fact, the manual work of Miranda's group was simply automated at the software level and implemented in the reverse form. The device, connected directly to Shepard's brain tissue via a system of thin electrodes, read data from her brain activity in continuous mode — and then this data was transmitted to the recording unit, which was submerged even deeper. Dumps, of course, was required to regularly download somewhere — for this purpose, Miranda and Chakwas conducted a "comprehensive survey" once a week.

(Chakwas knew everything — but she was like a cat, more attached to a place than to a some person.)

A squelching, slurping sound — the scalpel leaves a square of incisions across an entire section of brain tissue. Another precautionary measure. 

Miranda gropes for the block with the tip of the blade, and then picks up another tool. When the wound is in the head, sometimes you can use thin forceps, but now she dips a surgical spoon inside. Puts the extracted thing in a separate container. Miranda didn't have a lot of time to clear and re-run the missing data, and also to check everything for errors: the last thing she need for Shepard is to be short-circuited like a faulty mech. 

But she wants some free time herself. Shore-leave for the Citadel or Omega, for example. 

Miranda sighs. 

Maybe when Shepard would be lying in the lab during the rewiring... No, she won't trust Chakwas with that kind of surveillance anyway.

Maybe a little later. 

She straightens up; wipes sweat with the back of her hand. 

There's probably more than just Garrus of the Normandy’s crew who suspects something. How it may be else? It is difficult to deceive yourself with such virtuosity twenty-four hours all time. 

But they will be silent. Miranda is sure of that; she reports to the Illusive Man the same.  
The uncertainty is too terrible for everyone.

Shepard is a brand. No one wants to lose it. 

And any brand needs a smart manager — first of all. 

And Miranda is determined to continue to play this role — as perfectly as only she can.

**Author's Note:**

> It's a translation of fanfic "Перерывы ожидания" https://ficbook.net/readfic/8715983/22260913 made by the original author, me.
> 
> If there is any error in English grammar or punctuation, please, comment on it.


End file.
